On the Development of an Automatic ECG Monitoring System for Diabetic Patients

Abstract

Diabetes has become progressively common throughout the world due to changes in the lifestyle and in the eating habits. Among other consequences, this disease seriously affects the circulatory system, whose complications are the leading cause of death in diabetics. In this paper we present a new device, developed specifically for diabetics, which allows estimating blood glucose levels and, simultaneously, automatically detect potentially pathological electrocardiographic patterns. We will present the entire processing sequence system and will give special importance to the modules targeting the electrocardiogram (ECG) and its analysis. A set of reference databases has been used as support for performance evaluation. The system proved to be able to effectively detect changes in the ECG morphology for occurrences of different nature and in various contexts. The use of the ECG signal, whose acquisition is non-invasive, provides comfort to the user and has the advantage of allowing a continuous patient monitoring.